Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz

My practice unfolds between the fields of visual arts, publishing, teaching, translating, and research.

It is dedicated to activating the po(ï)etic potential of language.

It focuses on writing as a situated, embodied and embedded practice.

It moves between languages, genres, texts, and disciplines.

It relies on practices of bodily presence, attentiveness, sensing, and caring.

It involves collective thinking and embodied reflection.

It unfolds in relation to other beings, human and more than human.

It combines a critical approach to questioning dominant normative systems with a creative approach to exploring other ways of (un)making sense.

It seeks to activate sustainable relationalities.


I like to think of it as a practice of worlding

BECOMING ONE:OTHERS

2021
installative work and a series of performances by Ilya Borisov, Daria Kucher, Anna Mayrova, Yulia Platonova 

in the context of the exhibition How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found again, curated by Ekaterina Shcherbakova at Typographia, Center for Contemporary Art, in Krasnodar (RU).

What does it mean to be many? How are we to become hybrid? How do we emerge as subjects from the relational mesh we are part of? How to relate to one another as non-unitary subjects? Such questions were at the core of the project Becoming one:others, which has been carried through in Fall 2021 in the framework of the exhibition How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found again at Typographia, Center for Contemporary Art, in Krasnodar (RU).

DEARS

2020-ongoing

platform for writing practices in-between poetry, art and experimental writing including a print magazine, a series of performative events at various locations, and a series of reading and writing events at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich

founding members: Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nicole Bachmann, Robert Steinberger

graphic designer: Guillaume Mojon

DEARS promotes writing practices that navigate in-betweenness and rely on fluidity, hybridity, relations, and multiplicities to explore situated modes of expression. Since its beginnings during the 2020 pandemic, 5 issues of the print magazine have been released, accompanied by numerous readings and performance events in Zurich, Berne, Basel, Paris, Brussels, and Milano. More recently, the series dears, write brings together writers from all boards once a month at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
DEARS webseite, instagram, and
dears, write on dadablog

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine DEARS magazine salon des dispersexs Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Delphine Chapuis Schmitz DEARS magazine EXC librairie

withing

2023-ongoing

research group

with Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Emma Cocker, Laressa Dickey, Sabina Holzer, Ines Marita Schärer, Litó Walkey

How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?

withing Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Language based artistic research practice sharing withing Delphine Chapuis Schmitz language based artistic research practice sharing withing language based artistic research Delphine Chapuis Schmitz withing language based artistic research Delphine Chapuis Schmitz

Voicing textualities

series of performative readings, 2015-open ended

you can find a complete list of my performative readings here.


Over the years I have been invited to write and perform texts in different contexts, in museums, in art centres, in a library, in the grocery store of a mountain village... The texts performed are polyphonic textualities that move between languages. They are all written in and for the specific situation of their performance.

SENSING MAKING SENSES

5. October 2023

workshop at Convocation II, a meeting of the Language Based Artistic Research Special Interest Group of the Society for Artistic Research, Zentrum Fokus Forschung, Vienna

together with Ines Marita Schärer

How to activate relations of sense through sensing? How to embed shareability and challengeability in the very practice of making sense from sensing? How does sharing affect our practice of making sense(s) by means of language? These are the questions we engaged with in this workshop conceived as a session of practice sharing. A complete documentation is available on the Research Catalogue here.

The Quest

The Quest

22,5×30,5 cm, 160 pages, edition of 250 copies, with a text by Geraldine Tedder, designed by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz and Guillaume Mojon. published by backbonebooks, berlin, 2019
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Delphine Chapuis Schmitz sifted Christoph Schifferli’s collection on artists’ books, selected single words and sentences. Isolated and not longer attached to a context, the words were combined anew to verses, the verses placed on pages (…) The quest is on appropriation in writing, on sources no longer, on content through form. On poetry. Concealing, unveiling: A quest suggests change, is often allegorical, a plot divide to introduce momentum into a narrative. (…) A livre à venir, now become. (Geraldine Tedder)

A Throw of the Dice

A Throw of the Dice

Online publication & on site installation

with texts by Bérénice Serra, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Jana Vanecek, Shelby Stuart

conceived and curated by Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, 2020-2022

This project is part of the interdisciplinary research project "There is Something Wrong With My Hands. Oh Yes, They're Not Holding You". It consists in a series of commissioned texts published as a digital zine here.
In July 2022, an installative presentation of "A Throw of the Dice" took place at LIteraturhaus LIchtenstein, together with a collective reading of the text "Digital Fatigue in 11 Tableaux".

Translations

here is a list of published translation

Since 2009, I have participated in numerous translation projects across a range of contexts, including academic, literary, artistic, and other fields.
I began translating the works of German and Austrian philosophers who were the focus of my doctoral studies in Philosophy. I subsequently spent a number of years working for a translation agency in Zurich. I am now pleased to be translating works by writers in the artistic and literary field.
I translate from German, English, and more recently Swiss German into French.

Delphine Chapuis Schmitz Zhdk translating Delphine Chapuis Schmitz translating

birth (for Elisa)

board book
12 pages, color offset
eeeditions, zurich, 2023

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In Birth (for Elisa), organic shapes in fluorescent watercolours are playfully combined with “primary” sounds. The decal letters and splashes of colour that evolve over the pages evoke the first moments of a form coming to life – or is it a life taking shape? While open to interpretation and personal reading, the book echoes a conceptual and a visual birth, as it is the first to be released by eeeditions.